Two Gebhard Labs Unite
After many years of successful collaboration in the field of Gender Medicine and Women’s Health in Switzerland, Caroline Gebhard, intensivist and anesthesiologist at the University Hospital Basel, and Catherine Gebhard, cardiologist at the University Hospital Bern and the University of Zurich, have united their research groups in order to accomplish together their common goal of reaching gender equality in medicine in Switzerland.
This review highlights how both biology and sociocultural factors contribute to gender disparities in the provision of intensive care resources, common ICU diseases and outcomes. Link to full text article here.
Cancer and cardiovascular disease often share common risk factors, and patients with cardiovascular disease who develop cancer are at high risk of experiencing major adverse cardiac events. Additionally, cancer treatment can induce short- and long-term adverse cardiovascular events. Given the improvement in oncological patients' prognosis, the burden in this vulnerable population is slowly shifting towards increased cardiovascular mortality. Consequently, the field of cardio-oncology is steadily expanding, prompting the need for new markers to stratify and monitor the cardiovascular risk in oncological patients before, during, and after the completion of treatment. Advanced noninvasive cardiac imaging has raised great interest in the early detection of cardiovascular diseases and cardiotoxicity in oncological patients. Nuclear medicine has long been a pivotal exam to robustly assess and monitor the cardiac function of patients undergoing potentially cardiotoxic chemotherapies. In addition, recent radiotracers have shown great interest in the early detection of cancer treatment-related cardiotoxicity. In this review, we summarize the current and emerging nuclear cardiology tools that can help identify cardiotoxicity and assess the cardiovascular risk in patients undergoing cancer treatments, and discuss the specific role of nuclear cardiology alongside other noninvasive imaging techniques. Link to full article here.
Neues Frauenherzzentrum an der Universitätsklinik für Kardiologie des Inselspitals
Frauenherzen schlagen anders. Sie unterscheiden sich von Männerherzen beim Erkrankungsrisiko, weisen andere Symptome und Krankheitsverläufe auf und sprechen unterschiedlich auf Therapien und Medikamente an. Am neuen Frauenherzzentrum in Bern haben wir unsere Expertise für frauenspezifische Diagnostik und Therapie gebündelt und bieten eine umfassende Betreuung von Frauen im Bereich Herzgesundheit an. Unter Berücksichtigung der unterschiedlichen Anforderungen von Frauenherzen an die Medizin bieten wir interdisziplinär und individuell angepasste Behandlungspfade an.
Mehr Informationen hier.
On June 13th, Catherine & the team of Preventive Cardiology at Inselspital Bern provided a cardioavascular health check for all members of the parliament in Bern. For the first time, cardiovascular risk assessment was performed by using sex-specific questionnaires in order to account for the different impact and weighting of cardiovascular risk factors in women and men. More information can be found here.
Lipid-lowering agents constitute a cornerstone of cardiovascular disease prevention. As such, 3-hydroxy-3-methylglutaryl coenzyme A reductase inhibitors (statins) are among the most widely prescribed drugs worldwide, and statin therapy was shown to attenuate the risk of major vascular events, including myocardial infarctions, strokes, and coronary revascularization procedures, by about one-quarter for each 1 mmol/L per year reduction in low-density lipoprotein cholesterol. Despite the overwhelming evidence supporting the use of statins for cardiovascular disease prevention, conflicting findings have emerged from studies assessing the association between statin therapy and the risk of cognitive impairment, fueling a controversy that has been ongoing for more than two decades.
Link to full text.
Sex and gender affect almost every aspect of #heartfailure. However, heart failure treatment is limited by a profound underrepresentation of women in clinical trials, which has resulted in a lesser understanding of disease behavior in female patients and in treatment guidelines that are predominantly based on male-derived data. Consequently, large knowledge gaps persist in sex-specific disease mechanisms, optimal drug doses for women, and sex-specific criteria for advanced heart failure therapy. Such knowledge gaps can only be closed with a systematic approach to ensure that sex-specific analyses are considered in study design, trial recruitment, statistical analysis plan, and reporting. Read more here.
Catherine gives a key note presentation at the kick-off network-symposium at the Saarland University to start a new initiative promoting sex- and gender-specific research.
Pictured with the Dean Prof. Dr. Michael D. Menger, Prof. Dr. Ute Seeland, University President Prof. Dr. Manfred Schmitt, Prof. Dr. Cathérine Gebhard, Prof. Dr. Sandra Iden, Prof. Dr. Frank Kirchhoff und Minister for Science Jakob von Weizsäcker
In this study, we assessed Intensive Care Unit (ICU) admissions of 16,954 younger women and men < 52 years over a period of 12 years. We observed that ICU admissions for acute myocardial infarction decreased more in women than in men while ICU mortality for AMI significantly increased in women, but remained unchanged in men. In stroke patients, ICU admission rates increased between 3.6 and 4.1% per year in both sexes, while ICU mortality tended to decrease only in women, but remained essentially unaltered in men. Interventions aimed at restoring tissue perfusion were more often performed in men with acute myocardial infarction, while no sex difference was noted in neurovascular interventions. Our data show that sex and gender disparities in disease management and outcomes persist in the era of modern interventional neurology and cardiology with opposite trends observed in younger stroke and acute myocardial infarction patients admitted to intensive care.
After having served as an active member of the Young Talents in Clinical Research Expert Commission of the Swiss Academy of Medical Sciences between 2016 and 2022, Catherine steps down from her position in order to focus on the clinical implementation of Gender Medicine in Switzerland.
Department of Cardiology
Freiburgstrasse 18
CH-3010 Bern
Department of Nuclear Medicine
Cardiovascular Gender Medicine
Rämistrasse 100
CH-8091 Zurich
Department of Acute Medicine
Intensive Care Unit
Petersgraben 4
CH-4031 Basel
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